Words Of The Year With Quotes & Sayings

Let me quote a few words by Dr. Chalmers: "Thousands of men breathe, move and live, pass off the stage of life, and are heard no more - Why? They do not partake of good in the world, and none were blessed by them; none could point to them as the means of their redemption; not a line they wrote, not a word they spoke could be recalled; and so they perished; their light went out in darkness, and they were not remembered more than insects of yesterday. Will you thus live and die, O man immortal? Live for something. Do good, and leave behind you a monument of virtue that the storms of time can never destroy. Write your name in kindness, love and mercy, on the hearts of the thousands you come in contact with year by year; you will never be forgotten. No, your name, your deeds will be as legible on the hearts you leave behind as the stars on the brow of evening. Good deeds will shine as the stars of heaven. — D.L. Moody

Momsen was 15 when she joined Gossip Girl. Does she feel older and wiser at 17? "You get more insight as you get older, on everything. I kind of woke up one morning and I was like, 'Oh, I see what's happening, I get everything.'"

Then she stops abruptly. So what is it she gets exactly? "Well, I kind of woke up and was like, 'Oh, I get it, I'm a product.'" Which might be the saddest words ever to pass a 17-year-old girl's lips. But, with typical Momsen nonchalance, they're delivered with a shrug. — Hermione Hoby

Let this coming year be better than all the others. Vow to do some of the things you have always wanted to do but could not find the time. Call up a forgotten friend. Drop an old grudge, and replace it with some pleasant memories. Vow not to make a promise you do not think you can keep. Walk tall, and smile more. You will look 10 years younger. Do not be afraid to say, I love you. Say it again. They are the sweetest words in the world. — Ann Landers

Think of fear as a 2-year-old child who doesn't want to go grocery shopping with you. Because you must buy groceries, you'll just have to take the two year old with you. Fear is no different. In other words, acknowledge that fear exists but don't let it keep you from doing important tasks. — Jack Canfield

In the end, he was nobody to Adam, he was nobody to Ronan. Adam spit his words back at him and Ronan squandered however many second chances he gave him. Gansey was just a guy with a lot of stuff and a hole inside him that chewed away more of his heart every year. — Maggie Stiefvater

Whereas Mark Fidrych has awakened the boy lying dormant in every man's breast, Whereas he has reminded us all that, in an age of free agents and no-cut contracts, baseball is still a game, he has proven baseballs, like people, respond best to kind words and constructive criticism and not to saliva and Vaseline, he made Big Bird as popular with fifty-year-olds as with the playpen set" - Governor Michael Dukakis — Doug Wilson

My family didn't go to church. Once when I slept over at the house of a friend, her parents brought me to Sunday school with her. I was given this little pamphlet of tiny poems about the natural world, about butterflies and sunsets. My 7-year-old self was so astounded by how these few words were creating pictures and feelings in me. — Cheryl Strayed

And I was so tempted that night in Cippanhamm's royal church. There is such joy in chaos. Stow all the world's evils behind a door and tell men that they must never, ever, open the door, and it will be opened because there is pure joy in destruction. At one moment, when Ragnar was bellowing with laughter and slapping my shoulder so hard that it hurt, I felt the words form on my tongue. That is Alfred, I would have said, pointing at him, and all my world would have changed and there would have been no more England. Yet, at the last moment, when the first word was on my tongue, I choked it back. Brida was watching me, her shrewd eyes calm, and I caught her gaze and I thought of Iseult. In a year or two, I thought, Iseult would look like Brida. They — Bernard Cornwell

"I'm destined to die a virgin." My own admission shocked me. Had those words left my mouth? I rubbed the smooth material of Noah's jacket. Maybe I should have gone off with him. Not to get high, but to ... well ... not die a virgin.
***
"HOLY CROW, ECHO. You hibernate for a year and a half and wake up with a bang." Lila finished changing out of her church clothes and into a tight pink sweater and blue jeans. "Luke tells you he still loves you - and by the way, told you so. And Noah stinking Hutchins tries to kiss you. And you complained you were going to die a virgin." — Katie McGarry

When a printed book - whether a recently published scholarly history or a two-hundred-year-old Victorian novel - is transferred to an electronic device connected to the Internet, it turns into something very like a Web site. Its words become wrapped in all the distractions of the networked computer. Its links and other digital enhancements propel the reader hither and yon. It loses what the late John Updike called its "edges" and dissolves into the vast, rolling waters of the Net. The linearity of the printed book is shattered, along with the calm attentiveness it encourages in the reader. — Nicholas Carr

We're at the opening of the Globe." She thought back to Daniel's words under the peach trees at Sword & Cross. "Daniel told me we were here."
"Sure,you were here," Bill said. "About fourteen years ago.Perched on your older brother's shoulder. You came with your family to see Julius Caesar."
Bill hovered in the air a foot in front of her. It was unappetizing, but the high collar around her neck actually seemed to hold its shape. She almost resembled the sumptuously dressed women in the higher boxes.
"And Daniel?" she asked.
"Daniel was a player-"
"Hey!"
"That's whay they called the actors." Bill rolled his eyes. "He was just starting out then. To everyone else in the audience, his debut was utterly forgettable. But to little three-year-old Lucinda"-Bill shrugged-"it put the fire in you. You've been quote-unquote dying to get onstage ever since.Tonight's your night."
"I'm an actor? — Lauren Kate

Even Pushkin, who could understand everything, did not grasp the real significance of Dead Souls. He thought that the author was grieving for Russia, ignorant, savage, and outdistanced by the other nations. But it is not only in Russia that Gogol discovers "dead souls." All men, great and small, seem to him lunatics, lifeless, automata which obediently and mechanically carry out commandments imposed on them from without. They eat, they drink, they sin, they multiply; with stammering tongue they pronounce meaningless words. No trace of free will, no sparkle of understanding, not the slightest wish to awake from their thousand-year sleep. — Lev Shestov

A year or so earlier I had been to the Sky River Rock Festival in rural Washington, where a dosen stone-broke freaks from Seattle Liberation Front had assembled a sound system that carried every small note of an acoustic guitar - even a cough or the sound of a boot drooping on the stage - to half-deaf acid victims huddled under bushes a half mile away.
But the best technicians available to the National DAs' convention in Vegas apparently couldn't handle it. Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have triggered up to addres his troops during the Siege of Vicksburg. The voices from up front crackled with a fuzzy, high-pitched urgency, and the delay was just enough to keep the words disconcertingly out of phaze with the speaker's gestures. (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p. 73) — Hunter S. Thompson

At the beginning of the project, I wasn't certain that I could come up with an engaging storyline and cast of characters in this world, so I had a strong bias toward actually writing, and worrying about research later. In other words, I was afraid that I'd devote a year or two of my life to grinding through Kant and Husserl, then discover that there simply was no novel to be written here. — Neal Stephenson

It had been two weeks since her first real boyfriend, Jason, had broken
up with her on the eve of the first day of school. His exact words had been "Babe, you know I think you're
the best and all, but it's my senior year and I can't have the baggage of a relationship. I gotta live it up,
play the field. You get it, right?" Uh, not exactly. So Michele had to begin her junior year with a broken
heart, which grew all the more painful last week, when word spread that Jason was hooking up with a
sophomore, Carly Marsh — Alexandra Monir

The office Halloween party was at the Royalton last week and I went as a mass murderer, complete with a sign painted on my back that read MASS MURDERER (which was decidedly lighter than the sandwich board I had constructed earlier that day that read DRILLER KILLER), and beneath those two words I had written in blood Yep, that's me and the suit was also covered with blood, some of it fake, most of it real. In one fist I clenched a hank of Victoria Bell's hair, and pinned next to my boutonniere (a small white rose) was a finger bone I'd boiled the flesh off of. As elaborate as my costume was, Craig McDermott still managed to win first place in the competition. He came as Ivan Boesky, which I thought was unfair since a lot of people thought I'd gone as Michael Milken last year. The Patty Winters Show this morning was about Home Abortion Kits. — Bret Easton Ellis

I gather you weren't keen on going back to Scotland with your brother at this time of year. I don't say I blame you. Terribly bleak and cutoff in the winter."
"Oh no, Mom," I said, as her words sunk in. "My brother is not going back to Scotland. He and my sister-in-law are going to the Riviera."
The Riviera? I had no idea."
"For my sister-in-law's health. She's feeling rather frail at the moment."
"I don't think that frail would ever be a word to describe your sister-in-law," the Queen said, looking up with a half smile on her lips as a tray of coffee was reeled into the room.
"I managed to have six children without making a fuss. One just got on with it. — Rhys Bowen

Filled with determination, she pounded on Leo's door. "Wake up, slugabed!"
A string of foul words filtered through the heavy oak panels.
Grinning, Amelia went into Poppy's room. She pulled the curtains open, releasing clouds of dust that caused her to sneeze. "Poppy, it's ... achoo! ... time to get out of bed."
The covers had been drawn completely over Poppy's head. "Not yet," came her muffled protest.
Sitting on the edge of the mattress, Amelia eased the covers away from her nineteen-year-old sister. Poppy was groggy and sleep-flushed, her cheek imprinted with a line left by a fold of the bedclothes. Her brown hair, a warmer, ruddier tint than Amelia's, was a wild mass of tangles.
"I hate morning," Poppy mumbled. "And I'm sure I don't like being awakened by someone who looks so bloody pleased about it."
"I'm sorry." Continuing to smile, Amelia stroked her sister's hair away from her face repeatedly. — Lisa Kleypas

When the author is not traveling, he works at an L-shaped desk, which affords a view north through a large sunny window. He writes everything on an electric typewriter because "it has to be a book from the first day," he explains. He has no daily routine because of all the traveling he does, but follows a very disciplined writing process. He writes each page six times, then places it in a three-ring binder with a DePauw University cover ("a talisman," he calls this memento from his alma mater). When he feels that he has gotten a page just right, he takes out another 20 words. "After a year, I've come to the end. Then I'll take this first chapter, and without rereading it, I'll throw it away and write the chapter that goes at the beginning. Because the first chapter is the last chapter in disguise." He always hands in a completed manuscript, and his editor is his first reader. — Jennifer M. Brown

Darcy didn't want this interruption to last only a year. She wanted to see how long she could stretch this feeling out. To be dizzy with words again, like in that glorious week at the end of last November when everything had fallen into place. Darcy wanted that feeling not just for a year. She wanted it forever. — Scott Westerfeld

Then suddenly Percy was next to her, lacing his fingers in hers. He turned her gently away from the pit and wrapped his arms around her. She buried her face in his chest and broke down in tears. "It's okay," he said. "We're together." He didn't say you're okay, or we're alive. After all they'd been through over the last year, he knew the most important thing was that they were together. She loved him for saying that. Their friends gathered around them. Nico di Angelo was there, but Annabeth's thoughts were so fuzzy, this didn't seem surprising to her. It seemed only right that he would be with them. "Your leg." Piper knelt next to her and examined the Bubble Wrap cast. "Oh, Annabeth, what happened?" She started to explain. Talking was difficult, but as she went along, her words came more easily. Percy didn't let go of her hand, which also made her feel more confident. When she finished, her friends' faces were slack with amazement. "Gods of Olympus," Jason said. "You did all that — Rick Riordan

There is an incident which occurred at the examination during my first year at the high school and which is worth recording. Mr. Giles, the Educational Inspector, had come on a visit of inspection. He had set us five words to write as a spelling exercise. One of the words was 'kettle'. I had mis-spelt it. The teacher tried to prompt me with the point of his boot, but I would not be prompted. It was beyond me to see that he wanted me to copy the spelling from my neighbour's slate, for I had thought that the teacher was there to supervise us against copying. The result was that all the boys, except myself, were found to have spelt every word correctly. Only I had been stupid. The teacher tried later to bring this stupidity home to me, but without effect. I never could learn the art of 'copying'. — Mahatma Gandhi

For the uninitiated, 'Calvin and Hobbes' is a daily comic strip detailing the antics of an unruly six-year-old and his misanthropic stuffed tiger. The boy, whose vocabulary is packed with more 10-dollar words than a GRE flashcard set, is named after John Calvin, the Reformation-era theologian who preached the doctrine of predestination. — Anthony Marra

As the language areas of the left hemisphere enter their sensitive period during the middle of the second year of life, grammatical language in the left integrates with the interpersonal and prosodic elements of communication already well developed in the right. As the cortical language centers mature, words are joined together to make sentences and can be used to express increasingly complex ideas flavored with emotion. As the frontal cortex continues to expand and connect with more neural networks, memory improves and a sense of time slowly emerges and autobiographical memory begins to connect the self with places and events, within and across time. The emerging narratives begin to organize the nascent sense of self and become the bedrock of our sense of self in interpersonal and physical space — Louis Cozolino

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice. — Paul Auster

By 1950, Brennan was settling into a schedule that saw him making three films a year, giving him more time on his ranch and with a new business he started in Joseph, a 487-seat movie theater that opened on July 27, 1950. It was housed in a Quonset hut made out of surplus war materials also used to build the civic center. "The reason he got the theater built," Mike recalled, "was because the civic center was the same size, and they [Frank McCully and Walter] got the chance to buy two of them for half the price." At the theater's grand opening, actors Chill Wills and Forrest Tucker said a few words and signed autographs, and Joseph's mayor and other local dignitaries attended the event. A La Grande radio station broadcast the event. Curtain Call at Cactus Creek was the feature, following a musical short with the Nat King Cole trio. — Carl Rollyson

Given what the stigmatized individual may well face upon entering a mixed social situation, he may anticipatorily respond by defensive cowering. This may be illustrated from an early study of some German unemployed during the Depression, the words being those of a 43-year-old mason: How hard and humiliating it is to bear the name of an unemployed man. When I go out, I cast down my eyes because I feel myself wholly inferior. When I go along the street, it seems to me that I can't be compared with an average citizen, that everybody is pointing at me with his finger. I instinctively avoid meeting anyone. Former acquaintances and friends of better times are no longer so cordial. They greet me indifferently when we meet. They no longer offer me a cigarette and their eyes seem to say, "You are not worth it, you don't work."37 — Erving Goffman

When Winston Churchill wanted to rally the nation in 1940, it was to Anglo-Saxon that he turned: "We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." All these stirring words came from Old English as spoken in the year 1000, with the exception of the last one, surrender, a French import that came with the Normans in 1066
and when man set foot on the moon in 1969, the first human words spoken had similar echoes: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Each of Armstrong's famous words was part of Old English by the year 1000. — Robert Lacey

Any Day

Wiped clean by times stumbling gate
Reflecting toward my inner hate
I see sweet life spring anew
I touch a birth with what I do

As the dawn's warming rays
Melt morning's beguiling haze
I realize the truth of lies
A new year's hope with spirit flies

I wake the same as every day
I speak the words I always say
I see the sky the same again
And now know change comes only when

A choice is made in spite of time
A goal is set without a chime
Choice renders void the voice
To hearken in a New Year's choice — Roberto Vecchi

But you have fought and you have scraped and you have committed in a way that very few can. No one in any company has come as far as you have this year. No one. There's a princess in you, Evie, and a cracking good one. You've simply got to allow yourself the chance to be great." He began to pack away sewing supplies into wooden tubs. "Surviving the Academy only becomes more difficult next year. If you're planning to be here through the end, there is one thing you must absolutely understand. No victim has ever graduated from this Academy." She studied his bulbous back as he shuffled to the storeroom, letting his words linger. "You are not a victim in this world unless you choose to be. And if that's your choice, then you'll never be more than a frightened girl lost in the woods." He paused in the doorway, rubbing his back with the heel of his hand. "But the nature of choices is that there is always another." And a great, mischievous smile crawled across his face. — M.A. Larson

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. — Walt Whitman

Of all I saw and learned this past half year, one thing stands out. What goes
on in the class is not what teachers think
certainly not what I had always
thought. For years now I have worked with a picture in mind of what my
class was like. This reality, which I felt I knew, was partly physical, partly
mental or spiritual. In other words, I thought I knew, in general, what the
students were doing, and also what they were thinking and feeling. I see now
that my picture of reality was almost wholly false. Why didn't I see this
before? — John Holt

Each girl was an island of her own dreams and insecurities, thoughts that made us different in a deeper way than the differences of musical tastes, clothes or even culture. Thoughts about the best way to be stoic, how to live with very little control in life, how to make the most of a miserable time doing something you were supposed to love. And if people thought that fifteen year old girls never thought about these sorts of things, it was only because we didn't have the words to express them. — Alice Pung

The columnist gives these words to the longings of an 11-year-old he meets with Tourette's syndrome: Wisdom is encoded in our common language. We all have, to some extent, a complex, sometimes adversarial, relationship with our physical selves. And I more than most people know that it is correct to say,'I have a body.' There is my body, and then there is ME, trying to make it behave. — George F. Will

I weep without interruption. It's an unbroken flow of words and tears. With no pause for reflection. But I speak softer, every year a little softer. Perhaps. Slower too, every year a little slower. Perhaps. it is hard for me to judge. If so the pauses would be longer, between the words, the sentences, the syllables, the tears, I confuse them, the words and tears, my words are my tears, my eyes my mouth. — Samuel Beckett

I was an idiot," were my mother's last words. I'll never know what she meant because I wasn't there when she died. I am left with unanswered questions while I grieve for a woman I had barely spoken to during the last six months of her life. In fact, by the time I found out she had six months to live we'd been estranged for almost a year. — Amy Passantino

After everything happened with you and me, I tried to heal. I knew that I needed to forget you and move on. I hurt so much; everyday felt like a death sentence. I mourned you like you were dead and then, I met Leah. We were set up on a blind date and I remember feeling hope that day. It was the first day in a year that I felt hope. We took our time getting to know each other, I bought her a ring." He shot me a look to see if I remembered the iceberg.
"And then, all of a sudden I missed you again. I mean, I never stopped missing you, but this time it hit me hard. I couldn't go to sleep for a single night without seeing you in my dreams. I compared everything Leah did to everything I remembered about you. It was like the old wound opened itself up again and I was bleeding out my feelings for you." I close my eyes at his words. Words that I want to hear badly but that are making my heart ache so terribly I can barely breathe. — Tarryn Fisher

You're sorry? I damn near drank myself to death, I could barely get out of bed, I shattered my phone into a million pieces on New Year's Eve to keep from calling you ... and you're sorry?"
I bit my lip and nodded, ashamed. I had no idea what he'd been through, and hearing his say the words made sharp pain twist inside my chest. "I'm so ... so sorry."
"You're forgiven," he said with a grin. "Don't ever do it again."
"I won't. I promise."
He flashed his dimple and shook his head. "I fucking love you. — Jamie McGuire

In theater, there's a lot of discipline involved in doing eight shows a week for a year and a half. It's nice to be able to bring some of that bag of tools with you over to the film world, where you don't have the rehearsal, you don't have an audience. You don't have a month of rehearsal to examine these words, and you meet the guy who's going to play your brother the morning that you shoot the scene. So you need a bag of tools. — William Sadler

These new words were heard by my love; they persuaded it that the next day would not be different from what all the other days had been; that Gilberte's feeling for me, already too old to be able to change, was indifference; that in my friendship with Gilberte, I was the only one who loved. "It's true," my love answered, "there's nothing more to be done with this friendship, it won't change." And so, the very next day (or waiting for a public holiday if there was one coming up soon, or an anniversary, or the New Year perhaps, one of those days which are not like the others, when time makes a fresh start by rejecting the heritage of the past, by not accepting the legacy of its sorrows) I would ask Gilberte to give up our old friendship and lay the foundations of a new one. — Marcel Proust

Composing computer programs to solve scientific problems is like writing poetry. You must choose every word with care and link it with the other words in perfect syntax. There is no place for verbosity or carelessness. To become fluent in a computer lnaguage demands almost the antithesis of modern loose thinking. It requires many interactive sessions, the hands-on use of the device. You do not learn a foreign language from a book, rather you have to live in the country for year to let the langauge become an automatic part of you, and the same is true for computer languages. — James Lovelock

Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand and foot; hanging over the bed in the night-nursery; hanging year after year in the dark little study at Farm Street with the shining oilcloth; hanging in the dark church where only the old charwoman raises the dust and one candle burns; hanging at noon, high among the crowds and the soldiers; no comfort except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief; hanging for ever; never the cool sepulchre and the grave clothes spread on the stone slab, never the oil and spices in the dark cave; always the midday sun and the dice clicking for the seamless coat. — Evelyn Waugh

I think the therapists around this place think that if you know yourself, then somehow you'll be better and healthier and you'll be able to leave this place and live out your days as a happy and loving human being. Happy. Loving. I hate those words. I'm supposed to like them. I'm supposed to want them. I don't. Don't like them, don't want them. This is the way I see it: if you get to know yourself really well, you might discover that deep down inside you're just a dirty, disgusting, and selfish piece of shit. What if my heart is all rotted out and corrupted? What about that? What am I supposed to do with that information? Just tell me that. Most of the time I get the feeling that I'm just an animal disguised as an eighteen-year-old guy. At least I'm hoping that maybe deep down inside I'm a coyote. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

I had a tattoo once," said Kaidan. "Last year, just before we left England."
"What do you mean, you had one 'once'?"
"Bloody thing was gone by the morning!" His voice was indignant. "Sheets were black with ink. I put myself through all of that for hours, and my body just pushed it back out!"
And once again we were both in a fit of hysterics, sharing the world's best inside joke. We were doubled over, unable to breathe, and I accidentally snorted. Kaidan pointed at me and laughed harder, clutching his stomach.
"What was your tattoo?" I managed to push the words out.
"You had to ask. It was a deadly-looking pair of black wings on my shoulder blades."
Kaidan and I started roaring again, muscles clenching from the exertion.
We had no way of knowing it would be our last reason to laugh for a very long time. — Wendy Higgins

We were sitting outside at our favorite Italian restaurant, Callini's, one Friday lunch when Sam revealed to me what his ideal female looked like. A few women walked by and Sam used words like "big legs" and "too big up top" to describe women that barely weighed over 100 pounds. The following bomb then pried its way out of his mouth, "I'm still in love with Winny Cooper."
I replied with shock in my voice, "Winny Cooper from The Wonder Years?"
Sam glowed, "Yeah, Winny is my ideal woman."
"You do realize that she was a little girl in that show," I said trying to awaken Sam's better judgment.
He started laughing, "Winnie was a babe. I had a huge crush on her."
I needed clarification: "You do realize that you were in your 20s when that show was on. So, that would mean that you had a crush on a 12 year-old. — Phil Wohl

I want to sound like an instrument. I want my voice and my words to marry the beat. I go with the rhythm of it and the words start to come to my mind and those words could be based on things that's been on my mind for the past year, the past month, the past week, whatever; I write it. — Nas

He saw Nicole in the garden. Presently he must encounter her and the prospect gave him a leaden feeling. Before her he must keep up a perfect front, now and tomorrow, next week and next year. All night in Paris he had held her in his arms while she slept light under the luminal; in the early morning he broke in upon her confusion before it could form, with words of tenderness and protection, and she slept again with his face against the warm scent of her hair. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry - English, Russian and French - than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several - Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke - have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned. — Vladimir Nabokov

The earth's weight has been estimated at six sextillion tons (that's a six with twenty-one zeros). Yet it is perfectly balanced and turns easily on its axis. It rotates daily at the rate of more than a thousand miles per hour, or 25,000 miles each day. This adds up to nine million miles a year. Considering the tremendous weight of six sextillion tons rolling at this fantastic speed around an invisible axis, held in place by unseen bands of gravitation, the words of Job 26:7 take on unparalleled significance: He poised the earth on nothingness. — Brennan Manning

One day a Muslim friend and I were out for the day together. I had forgotten that the Fast of Ramadan had just begun and suggested that we step into a restaurant for a cup of coffee. "I will spend years in jail for that cup of coffee," he said, so of course I apologized for the suggestion. Then in low tones he admitted that his fast was restricted to public view and that he did not practice it in private. "I cannot work ten hours a day without eating," he said. There was an awkward silence, and he muttered these words: "I don't think God is the enforcer of these rules." As anyone knows who has asked any Muslim, they will admit with a smile upon their faces that during the month of the Fast of Ramadan more food is sold than during any other month of the year. But its consumption takes place from dusk to dawn rather than from dawn to dusk. Legalism always breeds compliance over purpose. In — Ravi Zacharias

The timepiece had been a birthday gift from Arian, his nineteen-year-old cousin in Tehran. It was plastered with pastoral steel and had the Faravahar hieroglyph sketched on it. This ancient pictogram was the symbol of a guardian angel. A remnant of a primeval daemon designed to protect the Persians. The clock's circumference was decorated with the flowers of life and in the middle there was a scripture written in cuneiform that read Good Deeds, Good Thoughts & Good Words. — Soroosh Shahrivar

What you don't know going in is that when you come out, you will be scarred for life. Whether you were in for a week, a month, or a year - even if you come home without a scratch - you are never, ever going to be the same.
When I went in, I was eighteen. I thought it was all glory and you win lots of medals. You think you're going to be the guy. Then you find out the cost is very great. Especially when you don't see the kids you were with when you went in. Living with it can be hell. It's like the devil presides in you. I knew what I sighed up for, yes, and I would do it again. But the reality of war - words can't begin to describe it. — William Guarnere

There are guys bleeding to death who don't know it, they're smiling, they're talking, they don't feel pain because they're in shock, they ask you for some water and then they're dead. On D-day I ran past a guy lying on his spilled guts with his eyes closed and his thumb in his mouth. Eisenhower's speech had been read to us over the loudspeaker by our commander when we crossed the channel that morning. What valor and inspiration were in his words- all about how we were embarked on a great crusade, that the hopes and prayers of a liberty loving people were going with us ... I got gooseflesh when he asked for the blessing of almighty god on this great and noble undertaking. But how to reconcile that with spilled guts on a beach and flies in the eyes of some dead nineteen year old kid who traded his life for some words on paper? — Elizabeth Berg

When it seems impossible that a deep connection with another person could just go away instead of changing form. It seems impossible that you will one day look up and say the words "I used to date someone who lived in that building," referring to a three-year relationship. As simple as if it was a pizza place that is now a dry cleaner's. It happens. Keep walking. — Sloane Crosley

It's easier when the patient is ninety-four, in the last stages of dementia, with a severe brain bleed. But for someone like me - a thirty-six-year-old given a diagnosis of terminal cancer - there aren't really words. — Paul Kalanithi

Dying well is part of living well and one day our society will surely recognize that. But I suppose we'll only know that we've reached that promised land on the day that the President of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society begins his address to the Annual General Meeting with the words: 'Tremendous news for the society. It's been our most successful year ever. So successful, indeed, that we now have no members at all. — Victor Lewis-Smith

A local phrase book, entitled Speak in Korean, has the following handy expressions. In the section 'On the Way to the Hotel': 'Let's Mutilate US Imperialism!' In the section 'Word Order': 'Yankees are wolves in human shape - Yankees / in human shape / wolves / are.' In the section 'Farewell Talk': 'The US Imperialists are the sworn enemy of the Korean people.' Not that the book is all like this - the section 'At the Hospital' has the term solsaga ('I have loose bowels'), and the section 'Our Foreign Friends Say' contains the Korean for 'President Kim Il Sung is the sun of mankind.'
I wanted a spare copy of this phrase book to give to a friend, but found it was hard to come by. Perhaps this was a sign of a new rapprochement with the United States, or perhaps it was because, on page 46, in the section on the seasons, appear the words: haemada pungnyoni dumnida ('We have a bumper harvest every year'). — Christopher Hitchens

He could have spent the whole night watching her red lips form the words to the songs. Those lips-they were as bright as the red maple trees that glowed this time of year. Her blue eyes danced with each fast song, a wild swirl of crisp leaves in the autumn wind.

That was how she haunted his heart. Every season, every corner of Gott's good land, he saw Annie there. — Rosalind Lauer

There would therefore have been all the more delight at the birth of the first son William within less than a year of Margaret's death, tinged with more than a little anxiety, in view of the fateful words hic incepit pestis, 'here began plague', in the burial part of the register three months later. Just how close this dread flea-borne disease was to the Shakespeares can be guaged from the fact that their Henley Street neighbour Roger Green lost four of his children and town clerk Richard Symons three. One estimate suggests that the town lost around two hundred, or about fifteen per cent, of its population during this single outbreak. It is a sobering thought how much the world could have lost at this time by one ill-chanced flea-bite. — Ian Wilson

My home is a red desert that trembles with spirits and bones.

There are two reasons I came here: my father's death, and the lion man who prowled my dreams. Perhaps it was coincidence, but a man--half wild, ravenous beyond words--slid from the dream world into the mud of the waking one the same year my father left this world for another.

Ghosts. Paw prints. I have tried to stay put. — Amy Irvine

In spring training prior to his 1995 rookie season, Chipper was already so confident in who he was as a player that he famously deadpanned to veteran slugger Fred McGriff, after the Crime Dog grounded into an inning-ending double play, these two words: "Rally killer." His confidence carried over to the field, just as it had since he began playing as a kid - he batted .265, and he led all rookies with 23 home runs, 87 runs, and 86 RBIs. Hideo Nomo was Rookie of the Year for the Dodgers, but Chipper and the Braves were World Champions. — Tucker Elliot

I was greeted by the Ulmers' eleven-year-old daughter, a girl of remarkable poise. Mrs. Ulmer was busily typing a manuscript that needed to make the evening mail and after welcoming me, in a very friendly manner, she returned to work. There were two other children and Mr. Ulmer, who was writing the manuscript just as his wife was typing it. The youngest child, who could have been no more than five or six, had the task of relaying the handwritten pages from his father to his eldest sister, who would quickly scan them for errors, and from her to his mother. The middle child, a little girl of seven or eight, lay on the floor with a large dictionary and would look up words when called upon by her parents or sister. — Robert Bruce Stewart

If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. — Ray Bradbury

She was tired in her bones, but she rallied her energy one last time and told him of they years in Rifthold, of stealing Asterion horses and racing across the desert, of dancing until dawn with the courtesans and thieves and all the beautiful, wicked creatures in the world. And then she told him about losing Sam, and of that first whipping in Endovier, when she'd spat blood in the Chief Overseer's face, and what she had seen and endured in the following year. She spoke of the day she had snapped and sprinted for her own death. Her heart grew heavy when at last she got to the evening when the Captain of the Royal Guard prowled into her life, and a tyrant's son had offered her a shot at freedom. She told him what she could about the competition and how she'd won it, until her words slurred and her eyelids drooped. — Sarah J. Maas

No way you're calling Ben. We already have a plan. Were going to his house, and I'm going to ring the doorbell with some fake lab work for Chemistry, and then Taylor is going to set off his car alarm while I year through his room looking for evidence."
"Wow. Great plan, Kate. Just out of curiosity, what exactly are you planning on doing when he comes back to his room to find you knee-deep in his secret Brotherhood bullshit?" Liam spat his words at me like nails.
"Oh, I'm sorry. Do you have a better idea? Ooh, I know. Maybe you could call you're brother and have him light his garage on fire or something. — Lisa Roecker

I only have one story now.
The story was heroin. It was made out of sensation, not words; it was invisible and murderous and unstoppable. Sam disappeared from her slowly, like a snowman melting, until all Blanca had left of him was a pool of freezing-cold blue water, arctic cold, sorrow colored, evaporating with every year. She did her best to hold onto him, but it was impossible, like carrying ice into the desert or making time stand still. After the final fight when Sam moved out, Blanca saw him less and less often. He no longer had a presence; he was like the outline of a person, an absence rather than a full-fledged human being. — Alice Hoffman

Oh, I should add, I'm not looting the city, but the people I heal often bring me gifts. I've got a statue of a dog made of gold with bright ruby eyes that dates back two thousand years. I've got the best television set that Arucu Corporation made last year. And I've got a piece of slightly used butcher paper with a crayon drawing of something that might be me or might be a spider, I'm not sure which, with the words "THAK YOU DRRON GRAGON" written on it. And various other treasures. — Bard Bloom

94 was a good year to be twelve. Star Wars still had two more years as Box Office King, cartoons were still hand-drawn, and the Disney "D" still looked like a backwards "G." Words like "Columbine," "Al Qaeda" and "Y2K" were not synonymous with "terror," and 9-1-1 was an emergency number instead of a date. At twelve years old, summer still mattered. Monarch caterpillars still crawled beneath every milkweed leaf. Dandelions (or "wishes" as Mara called them) were flowers instead of pests. And divorce was still considered a tragedy. Before Mara, carnivals didn't make me sick. — Jake Vander Ark

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture. Nota bene.
It tells you.
You don't tell it. — Joan Didion

I believe that the many administration officials, lawmakers, and regulatory policymakers - and their staffs - who poured a year and a half of prodigious work into the legislation had been guided, knowingly or not, by a simultaneously high-minded and pragmatic sentiment that Woodrow Wilson voiced before he launched the effort that would establish the Federal Reserve System. "We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it may be modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should be," Wilson said in his first inaugural address. Wilson's words continued to make good sense a century later. — Ben S. Bernanke

I never understood those commercials with the parents celebrating the end of summer. Now I understand that around mid-August, all the summer camps are over and you've run out of constructive things to do with your kid and you are desperate to get them out of the house. You've grown tired of your four-year-old pointing to words and asking, "What does this say?" Apparently it's not okay to respond to them with, "It says, 'Learn how to read.' " You don't want to get rid of your children, but you do want to get rid of them for a couple of hours a day. School seems like a perfect solution. Your precious child will learn something, and most important, you will be able to use the bathroom in peace. — Jim Gaffigan

Well, I am becoming doddering and old but I have - I'm writing two books a year now. It's like 220,000 words or something like finished, and, honest to God, I can't do that. I really do need the help of, you know, other people working with me. — John Sandford

Isn't it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn't going to be room to bury anyone anymore? For my ninth birthday last year, Grandma gave me a subscription to National Geographic, which she calls "the National Geographic." She also gave me a white blazer, because I only wear white clothes, and it's too big to wear so it will last me a long time. She also gave me Grandpa's camera, which I loved for two reasons. I asked why he didn't take it with him when he left her. She said, "Maybe he wanted you to have it."
I said, "But I was negative-thirty years old." She said, "Still." Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn't, because there aren't enough skulls! — Jonathan Safran Foer

This shift in culture has changed us. In the first place, it has made us a bit more materialistic. College students now say they put more value on money and career success. Every year, researchers from UCLA survey a nationwide sample of college freshmen to gauge their values and what they want out of life. In 1966, 80 percent of freshmen said that they were strongly motivated to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. Today, less than half of them say that. In 1966, 42 percent said that becoming rich was an important life goal. By 1990, 74 percent agreed with that statement. Financial security, once seen as a middling value, is now tied as students' top goal. In 1966, in other words, students felt it was important to at least present themselves as philosophical and meaning-driven people. By 1990, they no longer felt the need to present themselves that way. They felt it perfectly acceptable to say they were primarily interested in money.20 We live in a more individualistic society. If — David Brooks

An elementary school student asked me the NOT "politically correct" question, "Is an idiot smarter than a moron?" I had to Google it because I was afraid to respond in today's PC society and didn't want to offend him, his parents, or anyone else. Here's what I found.

Technically, a moron is smarter than an idiot. An imbecile is also smarter than an idiot.

Although today the words are considered insulting and derogatory, prior to the 1960s they were widely used as actual psychology terms associated with intelligence on an IQ test.

An IQ between:
00-25 = Idiot
26-50 = Imbecile
51-70 = Moron

Explaining all of this to a nine year old with an IQ of 130 made me feel like society has turned all adults into one of the above, myself included.

When I told him that I'm afraid to openly say it, the nine year old said, "Adults are idiots! — Ray Palla

Psychologist Carl Jung, in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul, wrote, "About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time."3 Jung wrote those words in the early part of the twentieth century, but with every passing year and decade their truth has become even more glaring. Holocaust — David Jeremiah

Cellar Christians!" Foyle exclaimed. He and Robin peered through the window. Thirty worshipers of assorted faiths were celebrating the New Year with a combined and highly illegal service. The twenty-fourth century had not yet abolished God, but it had abolished organized religion.
"No wonder the house is man-trapped," Foyle said. "Filthy practices like that. Look, they've got a priest and a rabbi, and that thing behind them is a crucifix."
"Did you ever stop to think what swearing is?" Robin asked quietly. "You say 'Jesus' and 'Jesus Christ.' Do you know what that is?"
"Just swearing, that's all. Like 'ouch' or 'damn.'"
"No, it's religion. You don't know it, but there are two thousand years of meaning behind words like that."
"This is no time for dirty talk," Foyle said impatiently. "Save it for later. Come on. — Alfred Bester

You read and read the material and after you've read the twentieth article you can't make any sense out of it anymore, and then you start thinking about the number of books that are published in any given year, in any given month, in any given week, and that's just too much. Words,' he said, looking in my direction finally but with his eyes strangely unfocussed, as though he was really looking at a point several inches beneath my skin, 'are beginning to lose their meanings.' The — Margaret Atwood

No further issues with Corinne Bishop or her kin in Detroit?" "Hunter didn't seem to be concerned," Gideon replied. "Said he had the situation under control." Lucan grunted, wry despite the weight of the discussion previously under way. "Where've I heard that line before? Famous last words from more than one of us over the course of the past year and a half. — Tina St. John

As soon as Darling had entered the reception room where his mother had waited, she'd curled her lip in revulsion at his appearance. Her first words to the son she hadn't spoken directly to in more than four years? The same son who'd been lost to them for half a year and who'd almost died? "You should consider abdicating in favor of Drakari. I know he's still too young to rule, but with your support the CDS might be swayed to accept him early. And make sure when you speak to them that you cover up that face so that it doesn't sicken anyone." She'd — Sherrilyn Kenyon

In the writings of a recluse one always hears something of the echo of the wilderness, something of the murmuring tones and timid vigilance of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry itself, there sounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. He who has sat day and night, from year's end to year's end, alone with his soul in familiar discord and discourse, he who has become a cave-bear, or a treasure-seeker, or a treasure-guardian and dragon in his cave - it may be a labyrinth, but can also be a gold-mine - his ideas themselves eventually acquire a twilight-colour of their own, and an odour, as much of the depth as of the mould, something uncommunicative and repulsive, which blows chilly upon every passer-by. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Junior, stop being orner." It's what Mama used to say to us when we were little, and I say it to Junior out of habit. Daddy used to say it sometimes, too, until he said it to Randall one day and Randall started giggling, and then Daddy figured out Randall was laughing because it sounded like 'horny'. About a year ago I figured out what it was supposed to be after coming across its parent on the vocabulary list for my English class with Miss Dedeaux: 'ornery'. It made me wonder if there were other words Mama mashed like that. They used to pop up in my head sometime when I was doing the stupidest things: 'tetrified' when I was sweeping the kitchen and Daddy came in dripping beer and kicking chairs. 'Belove' when Manny was curling pleasure from me with his fingers in mid-swim in the pit. 'Freegid' when I was laying in bed in November, curled to the wall like I was going to burrow into another cover or I was making room for a body to lay behind me to make me warm. — Jesmyn Ward

I think that its out very differences that make us a perfect match," he said, and his jaw moved under his fingertips. "You'd die of boredom with Thomas within a year. If I found a lady with a temper similar to mine, we'd tear each other apart within months. You and I, though, we're like bread and butter."
She snorted. "That's romantic."
"Hush," he said, his voice quivering with laughter, but also with an undertone of gravity. She cradled his jaw as he said, "Bread and butter. The bread provides stability for the butter; the butter gives taste to the bread. Together they're perfect."
Her eye brows drew together. "I'm the bread, aren't I?"
"Sometimes." His voice was a thread of rumbled sound, low and ominous. She could feel his words as they drifted over her palm. "And sometimes I'm the bread and you're the butter. But we go together
you understand that, don't you? — Elizabeth Hoyt

Men are hard-wired for risk taking - particularly young men. The number one killer of fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old males is accidents.6 Female investors hold less risky investment portfolios than their male counterparts and generally take fewer chances with their money.
Churches need men because men are natural risk takers - and they bring that orientation into the church. Congregations that do not take risks atrophy. Jesus made it clear that risk taking is necessary to please God. In the parable of the talents, the master praises two servants who risked their assets and produced more, but he curses the servant who played it safe. He who avoids all risk is, in the words of Jesus, "wicked and lazy". — David Murrow